Childhood Transpersonal Childhood Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness: Literature Review and Theoretical Integration
INTRODUCTION
I was at a Sundance with my great-grandmother who was blind. The music came on and just made me want to dance. I saw a big tall clear man where the center pole was, he was singing and dancing. Everyone around me was so serious and he made it so happy. So I got up and walked over to him and held his hand and I danced with him.
This simple tale was told to me by a 30 year old Cree woman from Alberta about the first time she walked at age 9 months (Gackenbach, 1991). Although this is a remarkable and beautiful experience can we really take it at face value? For D. it is not an isolated story rather an early remarkable memory from a continuity of consciousness about which she comments, "I don't know why it is important to remember that part of my life but it is so picture clear in my mind." She is not alone in telling these stories from very early childhood. Consider this from Franklin Jones, until he was 2 or 3 years old he recalls that he lived in a world of "sheer light and delight." Da Free John, as he has come to be known in his role as a religious leader, describes that early state:
As a baby I remember crawling around inquisitively with an incredible sense of joy, light, and freedom in the middle of my head that was bathed in energies moving freely down from above, up, around and down through my body and my heart. It was an expanding sphere of joy from the heart. And I was a radiant form, a source of energy, bliss, and light. I was the Power of Reality, a direct enjoyment and communication. I was the same as everyone and everything, except it became clear that others were unaware of the thing itself.
Perhaps Natives and the religiously inclined are predisposed to these experiences, but what of this from a housewife and mother of two in Spokane, Washington (Gray, 1988):
Remembering back as young as six or seven months of age, I was afraid to sleep that was an, as yet, undefined state in the face of which I felt helpless with fear... it was in response to those nightmares that I developed the "skill" of lucid dreaming [knowing you are dreaming while you are dreaming] ... at age two I remember the nightmares becoming more visual. I tried to find a way to tell if this state was "real" or not, if this was a dream because I was experiencing feelings of hurt and pain. I remember being very angry when people would say, "Oh' it's just a dream it won't hurt you!" I became more aware that my feelings had a strong influence on my nightmares but not as much of an impact while awake. (p. 98)
But still can we really believe such accounts when to the vast majority of us those early infant years are lost, revived only by tales from mom of the time she found us at the top of the bookshelf before we could even walk, climbing kings of the living room. We are told that before age 2 or 3 we didn't have enough language or cognitive structures to really remember.
These antidotes challenge our notions of the development of mind. They suggest a substrata of mind which here-to-fore has not been given adequate domain in the world view of psychology which conceptualizes development as due to complex interactions of nature with nurture. This substrata is consciousness about which Chamberlain (1990) notes:
in the light of evidence from the farther reaches of memory, accessed in nonordinary states of consciousness . . . we can even now ask ourselves: Is memory perhaps an innate and ageless endowment of human consciousness?
The most recent models of memory recognize that it is a complexity, not one system but different ones which are not always unified (Tulving, 1985; Gazzaniga, 1985). Furthermore, although memory can be limited in altered states of consciousness it is sometimes remarkably reliable and clearly beyond previously accepted boundaries (Chamberlain, 1981). In fact, we are increasingly becoming aware that the human infant is much more perceptually and cognitively sophisticated than previously thought. For instance, the neurological "wiring" needed for learning is present at birth including the ability to recognize mother voice (Bee, 1992).
But to say that there is a capacity to have such memories does not fully address the nature of psychospiritual experiences in childhood. It is their nature which is the focus of this chapter. That is, I will consider a related set of psychospiritual experiences which have been reported in childhood and will argue that central to them is the concept of pure consciousness (PC). I will argue that experiences of and approximations of pure consciousness are not only possible in childhood but along with Alexander et al. (1990), access to pure consciousness and related experiences facilitates development in all domains at all ages.
I will begin with a discussion of pure consciousness as the essence of what has been called the mystical experience. One of the key markers of PC is lucid/witnessing sleep/dreams, which will be shown to be related to several other transpersonal experiences which involve transformations of the construction of the self. As each type of experience is discussed its emergence in childhood will also be reviewed. Finally, theoretical models of these reconstruction's of self will be considered.
Go to: I. Pure Consciousness/Mystical Experiences (Next Section)